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Tidbits

05 Feb 2025 | News Roundup

It’s not really the kind of triumph that should have anyone popping corks. But Michael Shellenberger Xes out: “Victory! Shell abandons whale-killing wind project & writes off $1 billion. Another company abandons $250 million plant to make subsea cables that would have wrecked the sea floor. And a wind project in Maine is on the ropes.” Which is better than the alternative, unless you’re one of those so committed to the alleged bounty of wind power that you’ve gone over to Captain Ahab on those wretched whales.

The scary story of the week du jour is that “The African continent is cracking fast, warn scientists.” As if people in Africa didn’t have enough problems already… or consumers of news media. Or people committed to settled science since “Scientists have warned that the African continent is splitting apart at a faster rate than previously thought.” But the real story is that “A 56-kilometer (35-mile) fissure that appeared in Ethiopia in 2005 has been expanding at a rage of 2.5 centimeters (1 inch) per year.” Which admittedly is a lot faster than sea-level rise that gets equally hair-raising coverage. But still, the story concedes, “Researchers initially believed it would take tens of millions of years for the rift to fully open” but now it’s “within 1 to 5 million years”, as precise as it is scary. Unfortunately, the traditional media penchant for hyping disaster to boost sales has now merged with climate zealotry to produce a lot of panic over much nothing.

A couple of years back we warned, à propos of a piece in Canary Media, that when climate activists say they’re not coming for your gas stove you should definitely worry about it. And when they keep saying they’re not, returning endlessly to its wickedness in the process, we wrote “When climate alarmists deny that they’re coming for your gas stove it’s time to padlock it in place.” So now Canary Media emails us that “Today we’re publishing an in-depth, multimedia feature on the nascent effort to eliminate fossil gas from the U.S. food and beverage industry” (link not available). And though the story they link to is mostly about food processing, and the lead example targets the production of oat milk which we generally get by without, click goes our lock anyway.

From the “oh shut up already” file, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists or, if you’re ABC, “Scientists and global leaders”, have reset the “Doomsday Clock” to “the closest humanity has ever come to self-annihilation.” We’re now at 89 seconds before midnight, fully a second closer, due to … you’ll never guess… “‘the further increase in nuclear risk, climate change, biological threats, and advances in disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence.’” It’s a classic piece of scienterrifical marketing which journalists can’t resist, including the Canadian Press which explained credulously that “After the end of the Cold War, it was as close as 17 minutes to midnight. In the past few years, to address rapid global changes, the group has changed from counting down the minutes until midnight to counting down the seconds.” But is there any indication that at any time since it was invented in 1947 this clock has accurately measured anything? Other than the sales value of hysteria, and the parable about the small child who cried canid predator? And does it matter to the “evidence-based decision-making” crowd that there isn’t?

The Guardian runs a piece by George Monbiot headlined “Look at Labour’s acts of environmental vandalism and ask: did I vote for this?” with a subhed “Our rivers, our wildlife, the air we breathe: the government is sacrificing all to the insatiable god of GDP – and mocking our objections”. Yes, the same Labour administration under Net Zero fanatic Keir Starmer that includes Ed Miliband as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change though mostly the latter. So anyone thinking they can get the zealots onside by moving toward them should be warned again that, in Edmund Burke’s classic phrase, “birds of prey are not gregarious.”

2 comments on “Tidbits”

  1. If you eliminate natural gas as a heat source that only leaves electricity to prepare meals. But resistance heating is the LEAST EFFICIENT use of electricity possible. Resistance heating is literally a side effect. And of course unless you have a tall dam or molten magma close under your feet or have jumped through the hoops required to build/operate a nuclear plant, you're going to have to burn coal or natural gas to produce the steam to generate the electricity anyway! Considering all the inefficiencies inherent in centralized electric power generation and distribution cooking and heating with natural gas produces far less GHG than would be produced generating electricity.

  2. So a fissure in Ethiopia is expanding about an inch per year.Roughly the same rate as continental drift has been doing so for hundreds of millions of years.And the alarmist media seems to hint we only have 1-5 million years to prepare for some disaster of some kind?!Better head for the hills!

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